I found this assignment pretty fun to do initially, but I think I might have been overly optimistic in what we could achieve within the time. I have to say the animation was my least favourite part, mainly because I don’t think I’m very good at it. I can get the basic poses, but trying to add subtly to the movements is difficult for me. The Animator’s Survival Kit can only help so much, along with reference videos, but I still find it hard to judge.

I particularly enjoyed the modelling part of the assignment, and then having the part to specialise in a particular area. I think if I had made better use of my time, I could have had a better outcome in my work.

Module

I really enjoyed this module. Mainly, the animated short was the highlight for me, seeing the amount of improvement in all our animations from our first attempts. I particularly enjoyed Katie, Blayne and Natasha’s animation, that was just fantastic.

I felt as though this module helped to give me a better idea of what I might like to do, and also let us experiment a lot to see what could work and what doesn’t, as well as highlighting how important planning is.

This was not as straightforward as I had hoped. After getting the body shape modelled, I thought that the armour was going to be the easy part.

Initially I tried creating polygons, then I tried using a cube to create the armour, and I didn’t like how either way turned out.

I ended up duplicating my Pterodactyl’s body and used it to harvest the different pieces of body armour. It was already roughly the correct topology and it was the right size, so with a little tweaking, I was able to just slot it over the model’s body. I extruded each piece of armour by 0.02.

Once the amour was done, I deleted the body hidden underneath to reduce the number of faces, since you wouldn’t be able to see those pieces of the body anyway.

The hardest part was the head and arms.

When I tried to take the arms and head into Mudbox a lot of errors came up and wouldn’t let me import them. I had to basically rebuild the arm from the first down and then import it into Mudbox.

I only added a few veins to the arms but when I re-topologised it, I ended up removing them. At the suggestion of my granda I also removed the thumb from the model, because it just looked weird.

I also rebuilt the head, but only half of it. Then imported that to Mudbox, added detail around the eyes and neck. I had to increase the size to seven times the original before I could actually sculpt on it, since I had made the model so small in Maya. At one point I did try and just make the head straight from a cube in Mudbox, but it just crashed, so I took it as a sign not to do that.

When I took the head back into Maya, it was pretty easy to re-topologise it, but it took me a few hours. Then I mirrored it, and merged the vertices in the centre. I then scaled the head back down and moved it into place. I also, stretched the head, from the neck up, a little bit because it suddenly seemed too small for it’s body.

One really annoying thing that happened when I was re-topologising the arm and wing, I had saved it about 15 minutes before hand, when I somehow knocked the quad draw off and I couldn’t reselect the arm model to continue drawing the quads on the surface. I had gotten the wing completed and was near the elbow of the arm at this point and had to go back to the last model- which only had the top of the shoulder done.

Not fun.

I managed to get the model completed and saved at 23.58 though, and was uploading it by 23.59.